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From Mundelein to Loyola: The Origins of the Peace Studies Program
Mundelein students and faculty returning from Freedom March in Selma, Alabama, 1965
In fall of 2014, Kathleen Maas Weigert, Ph.D., the first Carolyn Farrell, BVM, Professor, hired Kathleen Ermitage to undertake an oral history project to document the origins of the Loyola University Chicago Peace Studies Program. Its roots lay in Mundelein College, a woman’s college which the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary founded in 1930.
In collaboration with Nancy Freeman, Director of the Women and Leadership Archives, Ms. Ermitage arranged to interview four people: Dr. Kathleen McCourt, then Dean of Loyola’s College of Arts and Sciences, and the one who formed a committee of Mundelein and Loyola representatives, to consider how the Peace Studies Program might come to Loyola; Dr. Prudence Moylan, now retired from the Department of History but who had helped develop the Peace Studies minor at Mundelein before joining the faculty at Loyola; and Dr. Bill French, from the Department of Philosophy of Loyola, and Dr. Gilda Parrella, now retired from the School of Communication, who were both on the Committee.
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